But here at the terminus of our driveway the cars kept coming, and one day after rising from the dinner table at the sound of yet another unfamiliar motor only to observe yet another carload of strangers helping themselves to a leisurely tour, I turned to Anneliese and said, “I’m puttin’ up a sign.”
In hopes of counteracting Seneca’s dictum, and believing in this case that the medium most definitely affects the message, I headed down to the aforementioned pole barn and rummaged through the scrap lumber pile until I located two mismatched boards of sufficient length to carry the lettering. Using a jackknife-sharpened pencil, I sketched the word PRIVATE on the first board, and the word DRIVE on the second. Next I sorted through my collection of half-used cans of wasp killer and WD-40 until I found a canister of bloodred spray paint. I shook it until the rattle ball went silent, then purposely oversprayed the pencil tracings so that here and there the excess paint ran in exsanguinous streaks. Then, being a stickler for detail, I fetched and loaded my Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum, leaned the boards against a box elder stump, and from a civilized ten paces, drew down the seven-inch barrel and blew six 240-grain slugs through the signage.
I hope I’m not putting you off. I was operating under the auspices of art, not violence. Certain respected craftsmen take strategic hammer and tongs to their high-end cherrywood credenzas in pursuit of the “distressed” look. I placed every bullet with the same judicious intent. Anyone who would judge these as incidental bullet holes would likewise impugn Jackson Pollock as a random drizzler. Furthermore, I was raised in a township where no road sign was fully christened until someone blew lead through it, and in fact I long suspected the town board kept a well-armed man on retainer for that very purpose. With every round punched through PRIVATE and DRIVE, I was establishing veracity. What you had here was what the art department refers to as a vernacular piece.
Jane and I hung the sign together. She gabbled happily from her safety seat as we bounced out the driveway in my beat-up and beloved 1951 International Harvester pickup truck, and kept it up through the open window while I mounted the signboards on a popple tree just a few yards past the mailbox. I attached the sign using drywall screws and a cordless drill. (Flagrant misuse of drywall screws is a hallmark of slapdash craftsmanship: I buy’em by the case.) It was nice there beneath the leafy canopy, standing among shifting blots of sunlight. In the spaces between the sound of the drill and Jane’s jabbering, I could hear the faint traffic over on the interstate. It’s two miles as the crow flies from here to Tom’s yard, and yet on heavy-weather mornings it sounds as if the big rigs are fogging through our garden. Even on the quieter days the hollow howl of tires reaches us—softened a bit, but held at an unbroken sustain as if someone capable of circular breathing was piping a jug—and it is tough to imagine what it is to have all that traffic just off the porch. When I sunk the last screw and caught the sound of those incessant wheels, it occurred to me to count it a blessing that our intrusions could be stopped so simply.
For a week or two, I came and went, and admired the sign. The scrap-wood look, the drywall screws, the scrub tree mount, the dripping red letters, the .44-caliber perforations, everything combined to send the perfect message: There’s nothing back here worth taking, and furthermore, do you really want to meet the guy responsible for posting the message?
But a thing is worth doing only if you do it well, and I shortly realized that for all my effort, I had fallen short by a single critical degree. The piece was passable, yes. Acceptably assembled, perhaps, to the undiscriminating eye. But one little detail—a missed opportunity, frankly—kept niggling me. And so came the day when, like a painter returning to the museum to retouch his own masterpiece, I unscrewed the topmost board and returned with it to my pole barn studio.
Today if you sneak down my driveway, you’ll see a sign pretty much identical to the one I mounted initially—with one critical difference, and although the critics have yet to weigh in, it is my opinion that this final tweak, this nuance, equips the piece to succeed on every level. The new sign—composed in the same fashion (cruddy lumber, runny red letters, and fusillade included)—reads as follows:
PIRVATE
DRIVE
CHAPTER TWO
In conjuring Tom Hartwig’s workshop you could do worse than to imagine an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake. The tangle is all wood, rubber, and iron. Wood-spoke chair backs, wood-spoke wheels, sawdust, and odd boards leaned about. Coiled air hoses. A stripped straight-six engine block. A large galvanized oil funnel upside down on the floor, as if the Tin Man fell feetfirst down a manhole. A steel-rail engine hoist bolted to the rafters. Two belly-high cannons, each dust-covered and stuffed with socks. Another cannon, the wheels maybe a foot high, Lilliputian but fully functional. A canister of gun bluing, a gallon of WD-40, a sprung tape measure lying in bright yellow zigzags across the floor. A torpedo heater, plastic buckets of Mystik grease, various teetering heaps, a deflated inner tube, a selection of squirrel-cage blowers. An overlapping cascade of adjustable wrenches, ordered by size and draped in the vertical from a rough-cut stud. On the wall adjacent, a single row of open-end/box wrenches hung neatly on nails. On the windowsill, a bristle of twenty-one screwdrivers jammed blade-first into a Styrofoam packing block.
This is not the comprehensive catalogue. This is just the first glance. The photographers have gone to rummage in the Rambler for a wide-angle lens. When they return, Tom leads them first to a John Deere engine. The ol’ one-lunger, he calls it, in light of its single piston. Dating from 1930, it is mounted on cast-iron wheels and fitted with a drawbar on the order of a toy wagon. This pumped water around here for thirteen years, he says. I’ll start’er for ya. He fiddles with the spark and throttle, spins the flywheel. After several spins, it refuses to fire. Ach, he says, I flooded it already. You open the gas too much, it floods.
This is our cannon business, he says, moving along. There are three cannons in immediate evidence, each mounted in its caisson and apparently ready to fire. Two have barrels the size of a short length of sewer pipe. The third stands just shin-high and its barrel is the length and circumference of Tom’s forearm. Scattered on the floor are parts for other unassembled cannons. This is an elevating screw, he says, picking up what might be the knob for an antique water faucet. You heat this a dull red and you drop it in oil and it turns black. You don’t even have to paint it.
I got interested in these cannons and stuff because my great-grandfather was in the Civil War and he was with the 7th Wisconsin, Company G, which was part of that famous Iron Brigade. Most of’em wound up getting killed. Then one year my ma got me a book. Title was Round Shot and Rammers. And they had sketches in there of cannons. And first, I started out, I was gonna make a lawn ornament. And then I got to thinkin’, well, I got black powder around for stump blasting and whatnot, I might as well make it so it shoots. And I just kept goin’ from there.
These two bigger ones, I had a copy of the blueprints from the United States Land Artillery for a Model 1849. I made everything half of what the blueprints had. The muzzle called for an eighteen-inch radius, I used a nine-inch radius. He pats one of the barrels. This is five pieces welded together. In an original it’d be either forged or cast. You make do. I gotta drill the touchhole in this one yet. He looks at the cannons a little longer. Yah, I should get busy and finish these up.
He leaves the cannons, moves to the very definition of a contraption: a homemade tangle of roller chains wound up down and around a conglomeration of sprockets, all hooked to a spring-loaded saw blade and powered by a repurposed electric motor. This is a shaper, he says. They had these already in the 1700s for makin’ gun stocks. On a lathe you can cut something round but you can’t cut anything odd-shaped. He shows you how the machine works back and forth, the roller tracing the shape of a hammer handle, causing the spring-loaded blade to shave a square stick of wood into the duplicate shape. I got it figured so it goes
ten turns per inch, he says. They come out a little rough, but all you gotta do is take a spoke-shave and smooth’em up. I built this to save time on making spokes for my cannon wheels.
He talked to the Amish to learn how to build wooden wheels. They tend to a straight wheel, Tom says, but he cuts the spoke holes at an angle so the wheel has a “dish” to it. They’re sturdier that way, he says, and they have some give when you shrink the steel tread around them. All the while he is turning the spokes and wheels over in his hands.
He moves deeper into the shop, the darkest corner. He reaches up and pulls a string, and a fluorescent light quivers to life. Yah, and back here is my lathe and my milling machine. They’re old. This milling machine, the last patent on it is 1916.
The machines are squat, and ornate, and impossibly solid. The lathe alone is over three tons of steel and cast iron. One of the photographers asks, Why such a big lathe, Tom? He smiles and replies, Because you can do a little job on a big lathe, but you can’t do a big job on a little lathe.
In the works and on the floor, you catch glints and, looking closer, see oily coils of shiny steel shavings. Here’s a deal I just made, he says, picking a silvery steel shaft from the lathe bed and holding it to the light. A guy brought me some shafts he wanted O-ring grooves cut in. But he didn’t tell me how deep, so I cut these fifty-thousandths of an inch. If they’re not deep enough I can easily set’em up and cut’em deeper. And this is a boring bar holder I made for the lathe here, like when you ream out the inside of a tube. I made it out of a broken tractor axle. It takes a while, but you work on it in degrees.
He holds the boring bar holder up for closer inspection. The surface is crosshatched with fine lines. This is what you call knurling, he says. Now he holds up another lathe tool fitted with three rotating wheels, each scribed with diagonal lines. This is a knurling tool, he says. You put it in your tool host and put pressure against it and it leaves a design like that. A lot of time knobs and stuff have knurling for gripping. He holds up the boring bar holder again, rolls it in his palm to show off the cross-hatching. No need of it on this, he says, it just looks neater.
One of the photographers studies the O-ring grooves. Did someone teach you these things, Tom? No, he says. No, you get good books and read’em. Understand what you’re reading. I’ve got a lot of books in the house. The lathe is the king of tools, because if you need something, you can make it.
Can you hold the knurling tool up, Tom? He does, and offers it to the lens. You back away now, so as not to block the limited light. Also to position yourself at the next stop on the tour. You have been on the tour before. You know how it will go. You know there is a specific choreography and timing. You know which jokes go with which stations. You know, for instance, that right now he is hoping someone will ask about the hole cut in the wall at the far end of the lathe, so he can tell the story of how it came to be, and you know if no one takes the bait, he’ll wedge the segue in there. Sometimes, out of courtesy, you play the straight man, feed him the line that leads to the story.
For now, though, you backtrack through the maze and simply run your eyes around the place. You wonder what calculus might quantify the cumulative toil represented by every hand-worn tool, every besmudged Folgers can brimmed with bolts, every belt and pulley, every project set aside for the moment how many years ago. And this is only what is visible and tangible—what of every project in and out of here over the decades right through today? Somewhere right this instant a hand-turned axle bears the weight of a loaded hay wagon, a refurbished bushing vibrates in the bowels of a quarter-million-dollar combine, the weld bead on a corn picker slowly rusts in the blackberry canes out behind some barn somewhere. In stillness, the place echoes with work.
The photographers are done at the lathe now and starting to eye other corners, so you take your cue, do it like you can’t remember: Tom, what was the story again with the hole in the wall there? And he tells it then, the one about the farmer who showed up with a fifteen-foot shaft off a manure spreader, and Tom with only fourteen feet of workspace. That lathe wasn’t going anywhere, so they jigsawed a hole in the wall and threaded the shaft through from the outside. Y’do what y’gotta do, he says, grinning at the payoff.
Inch by inch the photographers cover the shop. There are stories every step of the way. Leaving the lathe, he stops by the forge, six sets of tongs and a ladle for pouring lead all resting on dead coals beneath a chimney hood fashioned from the sheet metal of some long-gone machine. Beside the forge is a wood-burning furnace made of two fifty-five-gallon drums. On now to the hand-operated drill press his daddy installed before electricity was available and that Tom wired up to an electric motor after the juice finally did arrive. Once lightning struck and fried the wiring, and he’ll happily show you the scorch.
At the twenty-ton press, he pauses and says, I was pickin’ something up at Hanson’s machine shop and they were showing me their brand-new hydraulic press. I said, Whaddya gonna do with the old one? Hanson said, I wanna sell it. I said how much you want for it, he says, Hunnerd bucks. I didn’t say anything. Came home and mentioned it to Arlene. Couple weeks later it’s my birthday and the neighbor drove in the yard with it in his pickup. Here she went and bought it for me and never said nothing.
You’re tickled with the story, because that one you hadn’t heard before. But you’d stake your pending heartbeat on what’s coming next. You can see he’s taken the photographers on the complete circuit. He’s easing them toward the door. But he’s also angling for the corner, the corner leaned with an impossible cluster of rakes and pipes and shovels and posts and handles, essentially a tangle of parallels. But if you know what you’re looking for, you’ll see there’s a freak in there. A wooden-handled spade, just your standard shovel, except that after the handle rises from the blade for about two feet it turns completely back on itself and heads back down to form an inverted U. And right when it seems you are about to exit, he reaches in and he pulls the shovel out, holds it up, asks, Ever seen one of these? He waits a beat, then: This is a shovel we found in the ditch after the county boys got done leanin’ it to death!
You wonder, briefly, if in the hands of famed prop comedian Carrot Top that one would play in Vegas, and because you’ve been in on the joke for a few years you know it’s not a shovel handle at all but rather a failed oxbow, but even knowing the joke, you still enjoy the idea of him taking the time from the work of the farm to construct a gag shovel. You think of him at the workbench on a rainy day when he couldn’t get into the fields, shaving that oxbow down so it fit the receiver of the spade, you think of him smiling when he first held it up for inspection, you think of him leaning it there in the corner and anticipating his first victim, and you figure the world could relieve itself of a lot of pressure if more of us were willing to break toil for the sake of a harmless dumb joke.
RARE IS THE JOY THAT transports a country boy like a summertime pickup truck ride in the company of a sweet country girl. You will understand, therefore, that my heart is light right now, bombing along as I am down a tore-up dusty road with a blue-eyed beauty belted in beside me. I smile at her, and she smiles back. Then she repositions her blankie and stuffs a thumb in her mouth.
Jane and I are on our way to visit Tom. I’ve hatched a plan for a movable chicken pen that requires a series of five-foot-long steel stakes bent at a right angle five inches from one end (the bend serves as a handle), and to that end I have purchased a bundle of ten-foot rebar (a type of ribbed rod commonly used to reinforce concrete). Tom has agreed to cut and bend the rebar for me, and it’s jangling behind us in the truck bed. Normally we would be rolling on smooth blacktop, but crews are resurfacing and reshaping the curves along this stretch of county road, so they have chomped and removed the asphalt. Gravel rattles in the wheel wells, and a whorl of dust spins from beneath the back bumper to drift in our wake. It’s good to drive a dirt road, especially in a pickup truck. You get a whole different feel coming up through the wheel. There’s a littl
e give, a little float to the curves. You feel like maybe life is more livable when everything doesn’t have to be all double-yellow perfect. Given time and good spirits in the company of a child, I believe you should converse with that child, but right now Jane’s thumb is well planted, and furthermore I can cultivate in her worse habits than the love of watching farm fields slide past an open truck window to the tune of yesteryear’s country music legends, so I punch the radio button and dial up Moose Country 106.7. I do my best to raise my children right, but some lessons are best imparted by ladies, specifically among them Patsy, Tammy, Loretta, and even—especially—Dolly. (Later, when the boys start showing up, there will be supplements of Neko Case, Kathleen Edwards, and judicious applications of Koko Taylor.)
I slow to turn up the Hartwigs’ driveway. It’s a dirt two-track, and long ago recovered from the cement truck ruts—although, forty-five years on, Arlene still grumps about that foreman who promised to fix the driveway and never did. The drive is a good half-mile long, cut through a cornfield. Wavering bicycle tracks are visible in the sandier patches; in fair weather, Tom pedals out to fetch the mail. Recognizing where we are, Jane raises her gaze and uncorks her thumb. “I can feed Cassidy a bone?”
Cassidy is the Hartwigs’ three-legged dog. Took me a while to figure that one. For the longest time I thought the name an unusual choice. Tom and Arlene, the type of people they are, you think they’d go for something more in the vein of “Shep,” or “Buster,” or even “Ol’ Hound.” (My brothers Jed and John, in their own way younger versions of Tom, have named their dogs Jack, Frank, Leroy, and Sven.) You will get a sense of how my brain floats when I admit that it took two years and a quiet moment alone before the epiphany struck: Cassidy . . . Hopalong Cassidy! I was alone at the time, but I said “Ha!” right out loud.
Visiting Tom Page 4
